In former years there existed a widespread assumption that, throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was an isolationist power. Its policy, according to this thesis, had been articulated in Washington's Farewell Address, was accorded bipartisan acquiescence in Jefferson's First Inaugural, and was reaffirmed in the Monroe Doctrine. Until the Spanish–American war of 1898 isolationism prevailed, confident and more or less unchallenged; and then it suddenly collapsed, virtually without a struggle, leaving the Americans free to enter without inhibition on their new status of world power.

The black population of an American city is usually thought of as concentrated in the inner city, close to downtown, in areas characterized by ageing housing, high population density and slum conditions. General treatments of black residential areas in American cities tend to make little distinction between conditions in different parts of the country. But although it is true that the black ghetto is a ubiquitous and surprisingly similar feature of Northern and Western cities, there are good grounds for regarding the experience of Southern cities as significantly different. This distinction has been noted by the Taeubers and by Rose, but has not yet been developed in detail.

The main objective of this paper is to develop an alternative model of the spatial pattern of residential segregation appropriate to Southern cities, and to describe its applicability to Memphis, Tennessee. First the standard model of ghetto development will be outlined, and some reasons suggested why it may not be applicable in the South. After developing a model applicable to Southern cities, some of its practical consequences for ghetto residents will be indicated. Then Memphis will be examined to see how far the suggested model reflects experience there. In addition to a discussion of the spatial form of black residential areas in Memphis, some of the historical and contemporary processes controlling their development will be outlined.

Commonly Ezra Pound's Cantos have been attacked from two main directions. The first claims that the poem is interesting only at the level of technique, the second that the analysis of economics as the poem's thematic basis was either a mistaken choice of material or simply that Pound had inadequate mastery of this material. Both lines of attack agree in identifying a fatal imbalance between form and content which denies die Cantos an acceptable structure, but otherwise diverge: the first placing Pound as an aesthete-hedonist of his own rejected 1920 Mauberley model and the second presenting us with a mid-Western fascist yahoo. Neither proposition stands up to examination. Self-evidently die Cantos are a sensitive record and diagnosis of (and partial programme for) the civilization Pound felt was collapsing around him. The real difficulties confronting the reader lie in die arbitrary resorting to documentation, polyglot quotation and adaptation, the random shifts in time and place controlled by anecdotal maxims and categorizations operating as a formula for die healthy state. As a version of reality the poem does not initially seem to have significant correspondence with our own.

For American trade unions and labour organizations, immigration was a constant source of concern and anxiety during the second half of the nineteenth century. In their attempts to eliminate the more harmful consequences to their members of this flood of foreigners, they adopted and promoted a series of remedial measures, ranging from informal co-operation with the First International in the late 1860s, to attempts to strengthen the immigration law in the 1880s and early 1890s. None proved satisfactory. Pressure for further restriction built up and in 1897 the American Federation of Labor, to which most trade unions were affiliated, approved by a massive five-to-one majority a relatively new restrictive measure, the literacy test. This test was the central feature of an immigration bill sponsored by Senator Lodge, which had been approved by both houses of Congress in 1896 but vetoed by President Cleveland. The test was intended to discriminate against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of literacy were low. For Lodge, who had opposed a general head tax because it was insufficiently discriminatory, the literacy test “ would tell exclusively on the most undesirable portions of immigration.”

Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) has been called “the most famous woman photographer” and “the finest woman photographer of our times.” Indeed, in a photographic career that spanned nearly five decades, Bourke-White demonstrated great professional versatility, registered many photographic firsts, and in a male-dominated field set standards by which others were measured. During the 1920s, Bourke-White carved out her first reputation in architectural and industrial photography. Her pictures of steel mills, shipyards, packing houses, logging camps, quarries, auto plants, skyscrapers, banks, and terminals captured the atmosphere of the industry and the dynamics of the capitalist system. Her industrial photography was of such outstanding quality that, as one critic observed, it “transformed the American factory into a Gothic cathedral.”

Henry Luce was so impressed by her early work that he hired her as the first photographer for his business magazine Fortune. Under a unique arrangement she was allowed six months out of the year to pursue her own private studio practice for advertising agencies and corporations. When Henry Luce added the pictorial magazine Life to his growing publishing empire in the 1930s, he selected Margaret Bourke-White to become one of the four original staff photographers. At Life she established the tradition of negatives printed full frame and proved by black borders, and pioneered the synchronized multiple flash picture. Bourke-White revealed the range of her photographic talents in photo essays, murals, and documentary travelogues. “As a result of her twelve- and fourteen-page essays,” Carl Mydans noted, “her monumental work became known throughout the world — beyond that of any other photographer.”

When Liberty Hall, as it came to be called, the ancestral home of the Kenan family, was being restored some years ago in Kenansville (Duplin County), North Carolina, among the many books left in the library was discovered an accounts ledger used by two members of the Chauncey Graham family. The most significant feature of this complex book is the obscurely-entered, first-hand account of a supposed slave insurrection and its consequences. The author is Dr. Stephen Graham, and the uprising that he depicts in Kenansville can be linked to the furor unleashed by the Nat Turner rebellion.

The ledger is approximately fifteen inches long and six inches wide. Its dark binding remains intact; but the front and back, both of which contain longhand notations and arithmetical calculations, are practically illegible now.

Inside, the owner is identified as Chauncey Graham [Jr.]; and the book is said to have been started in January 1800 in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Dr. Graham recorded his patients' names, the work he did for them (e.g., extracting teeth), and prescriptions he gave them, as well as the ways by which he was paid (e.g., four pounds of butter; one cord of wood; or, less frequently, by cash).

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.

Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”

‘ There is always one theme in Mary McCarthy's fictions ’, writes Alfred Kazin in Bright Book of Life: ‘ none of these awful people is going to catch me. The heroine is always distinctly right, and gives herself all possible marks for taste, integrity and indomitability. Other people are somehow material to be written up. ’ Whether or not one accepts this as fair, one is inclined to agree that a pattern of identification exists between the novelist and her fictional heroines. A reader of McCarthy's non-fiction is also often struck, particularly of late, by the extent to which self-portrayal can become central to her treatment of a subject. The inward play of her imaginative response is frequently as much the substance as the servant of her outwardly avowed literary purpose, or the onward momentum of her narrative line. The intellectual, aesthetic or moral assurance of her self-characterization exerts defining pressure on her materials, be they those of the critic or the polemicist, the autobiographer or the reporter. This pressure of personality indeed relates more than it distinguishes, sometimes even fuses, these various literary roles, along with a number of their respective techniques.

James Gillespie Blaine has been seen by his contemporaries and historians alike as the archetypal late nineteenth-century politician. Acclaimed by supporters as the “Plumed Knight” and derided by opponents as the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” his political career was impressive. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Senator from Maine, came within 2,000 New York votes of winning the Presidency in 1884, and was twice Secretary of State. But his reputation endures mainly as a corrupt and unscrupulous politico. Historians have labelled him immoral, demagogic and “openly anti-British.” They have depicted him as a spokesman for a “seething” late nineteenth–century Anglophobia who was “excessively political, notably in his penchant for cultivating the Irish at Great Britain's expense.” This aspect of Blaine's reputation has been misinterpreted. However, he can still stand as the personification of politics at a time when the spread-eagle rhetoric of campaigns co-existed with pragmatism in policy formulation.

Dylan Thomas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Van Gogh, Paul Tillich, Wolfgang Borchert, Joyce, Kate Chopin: these are only some of the writers and artists in whose work the example or influence of Walt Whitman has been detected over the past few years, and as anyone who has kept abreast of Whitman criticism will be instantly aware, the list could be lengthened considerably. Comparison and influence studies are such a common feature of Whitman scholarship, and he is so firmly established as one of the most provocative mid-nineteenth-century forerunners of modern literature and art, that it would seem virtually impossible to provide a hitherto unexplored instance which is worth more than a glance. Yet the name of the great twentieth century singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie has never been advanced in this context, even though similarities between the two figures have been noted in passing by commentators on Guthrie at least since the publication in 1943 of the latter's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Such neglect must be ascribed at least in part to a lingering academic bias against the study of popular culture in general and of song lyrics in particular.

Much has been made of Washington Irving's literary debts to Walter Scott. Influence there was, stretching back long before that day late in August 1817 when the laird of Abbotsford came limping up the gravel walk to greet his American visitor. But the relationship cannot be adequately expressed as Irving's discipleship to Scott. There were obligations on both sides.

It once seemed that the civil rights movement resulted from a kind of historical immaculate conception and signalled an historical “break” of major proportions. Now, however, we have historical studies tracing a long tradition of “core values” at work in black American culture and sociological studies that reconstruct the dense institutional matrix from which the civil rights movement emerged and drew sustenance. We can now identify historical developments – the great migration of southern blacks to the North, the increasing prosperity enjoyed by the South after World War II, and, most crucially, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 – that set the stage for the movement. Nor could the movement have come into existence without the nexus of black churches and colleges, the early work of the NAACP or the emergence of action-oriented organizations such as SCLC, SNCC and CORE. Even before Montgomery, we now learn, there were mass action campaigns by southern blacks that provided both information and inspiration for the fledgling movement in the capital of the Confederacy.

In his diary in July 1946 Senator Claude Pepper of Florida noted that Great Britain was “showing considerable progress in [a] year under its socialist government – nationalization of [the] Bank of England, coal mines … . They have enacted [a] housing program and extended [the] social security system and a national health system. That is the direction of things everywhere but here.” The question of why American social democracy did not take off in the same way after World War Two as elsewhere in the industrialised world has become an important issue in recent American historiography. Indeed, the question of what was left, in both senses of the word, of “liberalism” after the death of Franklin Roosevelt assumes particular importance when one considers the fact that there were in the United States in 1946 a fair number of liberal political thinkers who were committed to using the New Deal and wartime experience as a launch pad for further left-of-centre political experimentation. Claude Pepper, Henry Wallace, Helen Douglas, Harold Ickes, Rexford Tugwell, Paul Douglas – all were in positions of political or intellectual influence at the end of the Second World War. Yet, by 1950, they would all experience either political defeat or a shift away from vocal commitment to social democratic values.